Welcome to Mere Rhetoric, the podcast for beginners and insiders
about the ideas, people and movements who have shaped rhetorical
history. I’m Mary Hedengren, we have Samantha and Morgan in the
booth and we’re all three of us different people—why?

Who determines who you are? Why do you pursuit the things that
are important to you, whther they be published articles, a thin and
athletic physique or a reputation of being a decent human being?
Michael Foucault addresses the idea of forming “docile bodies” in
Discipline and Punish.

This book starts with a graphic, contemporary description of
someone being drawn and quartered and ends with the declaration
that “The judges of normality are present everywhere [...] and each
individual, where ever he may find himself, subjects to it his
body, his gestures, his behavior, his aptitudes, his achievements”
(304). It’s a chilling progression. But if you think about it,
there are things that we do because of “judges of normality” that
we couldn’t be forced into by a tortuter. Can you imagine a prison
where it would be moral to force you to wake up at 4:30 and run 10
miles and then lift weights, and then to relax with a glass of
mysterious green smoothie? But if you think you need to look a
certain way then you might do these unpleasant things to satisfy
the “judges of normality.” The link between old-style torture and
contemporary judgemental attitudes trace through this text.

Here are the highlights along the way: torture as public spectacle
(7). body as intermediary between people and sovereign (11). But a
change occurs: punishment stops being about whether or not the
accused commiteed the crime and more about whther the accused is
guilty. That sounds like teh same thing, but really it’s a little
different because justie began to consider “to what extent the
subject’s will was involved in the crime’ (17). Accordingly,
punishment became to be about straightening out taht will “the
expiation that once rained down up on the body must be replace by a
punishment that acts in depth on the heart, the thoughts, the will,
the inclinations” (16) and “a general process has led judges to
judge something other than crims; they ahve been led in their
sentencing to do soemthing other than jsut and the power of judging
has been transferred, in part, to other autorities than the jduges
of the offence” as sociologists, preachers and other just eh will
and the inclination of the accused (22).

Soverign maintains “right to punish” like the “right ot make war”
(48) but “the role of the people was an ambigous one” as they also
“caimed the right to conserve the execution” and “had the right to
take part” of the specacle (58). This made executions a battle
between the power of the soverign and the power of the people: “In
these executions, whih out to show only the terrorizing power of
the prince, there was a whole aspect of the carnival, in which
rules were inverted, authority mocked and criminals transformed
inot heroes” (61). So, “this hand-to-hand fight ebtwen the vengence
of the princ aand the contained anger of the people, through the
mediation of the victim and the executioner, must be concluded”
(73). So reformers had to “define new tactis in order to reach a
target that is now more subtle but also more widely spread in the
social body” (89) not just committing a certain crime. ‘A stupid
despot may constrain his slaves with iron chains; but a true
politician binds them even more strongly by the chain of (102)
their own ideas; it is at the stable point of reason that he
secures the end of the chain” (103).

So bodies in prisons are made docile, “subjected, used, transformed
and improved” (136) as “working [the body] retail indivdually, of
exercising upon it a subtle coercion, of obtaining holds up on it
at the level of the mechanism itself—movements, gestures attitudes,
rapidity: an infinitesimal power over the active body” (137). And
this is by no means restricted to the prison: the classroom, the
military camp and the hospital all begin to prescribe this level of
control over the bodies to be made docile. “Like surveillance and
with it, normalization becomes one of the great instruments of
power at the end of the classical age” (184) “In a system of
discipline, the child is more individualized that the adult, the
patient more than the healthy man, the madman and the delinquent
more than the normal and non-delinquent” (193).

The panopticon, of course, features heavily. DESCRIBE “In short, it
reverse the principle of the duneon; or rather of its three
functions—to enclose, to deprive of light and to hide—the preserves
only the first and eliminates to other two” (200). “There are two
images, then, of discipline. At one extreme, the
discipline-blockage, the enclosed institutions, established on the
edges of society, turned inwards towards negative functions:
arresting evil, breaking communications, suspending time. At the
toher extreme, with panopticism, is the discipline-mechanism: a
functional mechanism that must improve tehe xercise of power b
making it lighter, more rapid, more effective, a design of subtle
coercion for a society to come” (209). “At first they were expected
to neutralize dangers, to fix useless or disturbed poulations, to
avoid the inconveniences of over-large assemblesi; now they were
being asked to play a positive role, for they were bceoming able to
do so, to increase the possible utility of individuals” (210).

“‘Discipline’ may be identified neither with an institution nor
with an apparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for its
exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques,
prcedures, levels of application, targes; it is a ‘physics’ [...]
of power” (215).

Difference between illegality and delinquencies—a delinquent is
subset of illegal: defines and specifies the delinquent, which can
be used by prison and authority forever afterwards. It creates a
three-fold system—prison, police, delinquent (282)

Eventually, the prison mentality escpaed the prison. “As a result,
a cetain signifcant generality moved between the least irregularty
and the greatest crime; it was no longer th offense, the attack on
the common interest, it was the school, the court, the asulum or
the prison. It geeralise in teh sphere of meaning the function of
carceral generalized in the sphere of tactics’ (299) “The carceral
network does not cast the unassimilable into a confused hell; there
is no outisde. it takes back with one hand what it seems to exclude
witht he other” (301) prison continues, on those who are enslaved
to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues
on (302)each individual through innumerable mechanisms of
discipline (303). “We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the
doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the ‘social-worker’-judge; it it
on them that the universal reign of the normalitve is based, and
each individual, whereever he may find himself, subjects to it his
body, his gestures, his beavior, his aptttudes, his acheivements”
(304).

So what does all of this mean for rhetoric? Some theorists, like
Edward Said and Richard Miller despair at ever standing outside of
the panopticon, that the power relations are too deeply entwined
and too dispersed to be opposed. Instead of just stickin’ it to the
man, or rescuing Robin Hood from the corrupt Sherriff of
Nottingham, would-be revolutionaries have to change the entire
system. And what makes the revolutionaries think that they have a
better perspective when they, too, are implicated in the
self-policing power structure?

In 1992, Barbara Beisecker examined Foucault’s influence for
rhetoricians. Initially she was skeptically inclined (especially in
the early 90s!) to say that Foucault was just being invoked in
order to embrace the fashion for post-modernism without losing our
traditional perspectives on power dynamics. However, foucault’s
focus on theways that communities construct individual positions
opens up new views of rhetoric. Biesecker concludes that because of
Foucault, “We might say, then, that a critical rhetoric is a timely
discourse whose task is not, as we have heretofor thought, one of
changing what’s in people’s heads.” Instead it is about turning the
grid of intelligibility that organizes the present in such a way
that it becomes possible to transform the crituqe conducted in the
form of necessary limitation into a practical crituqe that takes
the form of a possible transgression out of which new forms of
community, co-existence, pleasure” will emerge” (362). Rhetoric
becomes less about individuals than the whole community, all
focused on creating docile bodies, prioritizes.

It may be daunting to think about changing an entire community
with rhetoric instead of one person., but as young John Muckelbauer
in 2000 argued, there are still ways to effect change even in
Foucault’s self-policing view of culture, as long as we “debundle
what we mean by resistence his articulation of resistanceis clearly
something quite differentfrom a traditional understandingof
resistancewith its connection to “agency”. […] the concept of power
functions differently(as primarily productive),and the
relationshipbetween power and resistanceis not one of binary
opposition. On a more practical level,anothermajordistinction
isthat this versionprovidesno central concept, no preexisting
category—such as identity—around which to mobilize collective
action. Instead, political action is itself transfigured,
emphasizing strategic local ac- tivity and transitory alliances as
opposed to traditionalconceptions of mass collective
movements.”

So we’re not entirely subsumed by predetermined roles because of
the judges of normalicy all around us, but neither are we free when
we are unfettered.

About the Podcast

A podcast for beginners and insiders about the people, ideas and movements that have defined the history of rhetoric.